Sandya Narayanswami fell in love with flying at the age of just eight. At the controls of her tiny plane she finds the peace and freedom she has searched for all her life
When Sandya Narayanswami was invited to a dinner by a friend who worked at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, she was excited. Many of the guests flew planes. “I must have expressed some yearning,” she says, because someone told her: “You should join the flying club!” The next day Narayanswami, who was 57 at the time, arranged to meet an instructor. “I said: ‘Aren’t I too old?’ He said: ‘We’ve got students in their 80s.’”
On her trial flight, her instructor took her over Pasadena. “You are very close to the air, because the plane is really small and the windows are big. I felt the air, I felt the motion. I felt as a bird might feel,” she says.
